Two Weeks' Notice
by Rhianwen
Summary: Tomorrow she will go buy that plane ticket. Two weeks' notice will be enough. MidROD the TV. JokerWendy. Sort of.


Two Weeks' Notice

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Summary: "Tomorrow she will go buy that plane ticket. Two weeks' notice will be enough." Mid-ROD the TV. Joker/Wendy...sort of.

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Disclaimer: The characters portrayed in this piece are the creations of the guy who came up with them. Who is blatantly not me. C'mon, I could _never_ come up with characters this interesting!

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Really, she should have known. 

Nothing she has hoped for with this sort of fierce longing has ever been worth the time she put into constructing her starry and rainbow-tinted dreams surrounding it.

Why should he be any different?

It makes perfect sense, when she thinks about it, and just like something that _would_ happen to her, that his arm wrapped loosely around her, his body pressed against her from behind, her pretty pale misty blue sheets dingy grey in the low light and tangled around them, should feel not warm and beautifully safe and perfect as her girlish idealism assumed without question that they would, but stifling and confining. Oppressive.

She really should have known.

His breath is hot and damp against the back of her neck, the heat trapped between them oily and sticky, and she can't breathe because this is exactly what she's wanted for years and now she doesn't and even though she knows that there must be something very wrong with her, it doesn't stop her from retching as the scent of his cologne mixed with her perfume mixed with sweat mixed with the sickly-sweet vanilla candles on her dresser settles over her and all she really wants to do right now is change the bed sheets and then have a shower and forget his name and maybe hers too.

As she cringes away from his hand resting heavy and carelessly possessive on her thigh, the thought hits her that really, this isn't a sudden and swift disillusionment, this feeling that she needs to get as far from him as quickly as possible or risk saying or doing something they'll both regret, but the sadly logical conclusion of a process.

At first, nothing more than the tugging worry that really, he can be _so _inconsiderate with other people's time and effort sometimes.

Then annoyance over the same, although never when she caught the brunt of it herself.

And finally just a hint, fatally, of disgust towards a man for whom lies have become such a habit that she doubted very much if he could tell the complete and unaltered truth at this point if he wanted to.

Still, all of these, clearly visible in retrospect, seemed to melt away earlier this evening when he stayed longer than their work made _strictly _necessary, and after a while kissed her, catching her by the arm and by surprise as she moved to return their coffee mugs to the kitchen.

She wonders dimly now whatever happened to those cups – she doesn't remember putting them down anywhere.

By the time his murmured suggestion that they move this elsewhere brushed against her ear, nothing of these thoughts of disgust with him had remained, and when he began unfastening and discarding her clothes and then his, she could have died happy then and there.

Now she feels that she'd like to die, or at least very quickly and quietly disappear, even as he shifts slightly against her and meltingly warm and sweet echoes of that earlier fiercely burning ache that he was able to stir in her with terrifyingly little effort flare from the brief contact and then fade again.

For there was nothing at all lacking in the act itself, in going to bed with him – making love, she would call it if it hadn't done exactly the opposite and created in her the kind of hate she never thought she could have for him.

_That_ was everything that her silly girlish fantasies could have dreamt up, and she is not surprised, really. It only seems like _him_ to accept nothing less than complete surrender, and feigning enjoyment is certainly not that – leaves far too much room for her to hold something back from him.

Maybe he _knew_ just how much she had to hold back.

She wonders dully if he just happened to be more observant of her own mental state than she was, and upon perceiving this gradual erosion of the view in her mind of him as barely lower than the angels, decided coolly and decisively on _this_ as a means of reversing it.

Or maybe this was his method of reminding her that, try as she might, she would never belong to herself again, that even if she managed to hate him briefly, he could have her love back again, willing or unwilling, whenever he chose to take it. It was simply too unimportant to bother with until now, when he'd a few spare moments and a need for a trivial little _game_.

She has no idea which it is, and no desire to know if it really is the second. The first might have a purpose outside of sheer pettiness, and even if that purpose had nothing to do with kindness and affection, she can wrap herself in the cold comfort of knowing that her competence and effectiveness are worth expending a little effort for. But she's already felt her love and desire for him, not to mention her regard for him as a friend, dissipate like smoke, and she thinks that, at the very least, Fate might let her keep her respect for him as a leader, with grand and lofty dreams, who doesn't stoop to this sort of thing.

The one possibility that she does not consider, except as a joke that really isn't very funny anyway is that she has judged him unfairly and he really does have human emotions hidden away in there somewhere, a capacity for genuine affection that somehow came to center on her.

She can't tell if the sharp shudder that this thought sends through her is terror or longing.

If this is how deep her feelings can go, if they really do just vanish once she's granted a tiny bit of what she wants, it's just as well that she won't have the chance to hurt anyone who _can_ be hurt. Maybe, in the new world, she'll be a good person.

Maybe, in the new world, he will too.

She eases his hand slowly and carefully away from her and chokes back irrational tears as his fingers clasp tightly around hers in sleep. Forcing back the urge to pull away quickly and sharply and risk waking him – the mere idea of trying to muddle through a conversation with him right now is horrifying – she slips her hand out of his and disentangles from the sheets.

As she reaches for her clothes earlier discarded to pool on the floor amid a pool of moonlight, she contemplates, idly, not – completely – seriously, the idea of leaving. He will be away, leaving in a few days, for two weeks, so she can buy a plane ticket, give her two weeks notice, and be gone before he returns. Maybe they'll run into each other at the airport.

When she is finished dressing, she ventures a quick glance at him to make sure he is still asleep, and then walks from the room, her pace quickening as her enthusiasm for this mad idea grows.

Of course, it is a cheap way to go, but something tells her – she knows for a fact – that this is not the sort of organization one leaves by simply giving notice, particularly at this point. But _because_ they're at this point, no one will have a thought to spare for her and the nasty surprise of her lack of any _real_ loyalty.

She'll hate herself for her weakness and cowardice, but only until he has succeeded and she's allowed to forget – forget her desertion, and forget that she was ever a part of this.

She won't be able to buy her ticket tonight, of course, so for now she'll only go out and walk a bit, straighten it out in her mind exactly how she can do this.

If he wakes up, she thinks absently, casting a glance at the bedroom door as she hunts up her keys, he'll be angry that she left.

Or at least, he'll mask his indifference behind a veneer of reproachfulness. At the very most, he'll be annoyed.

She wonders if his reaction upon finding her letter of notice will be any stronger, and whether it's fear that he'll care or fear that he won't that's making her unable to breathe.

It would be a lot easier to decide things like this if only she knew for certain what this evening has turned him into for her, and whether this disillusionment is real, or only her shield against the pain of falling even more swiftly for a man who has neither the inclination nor the capacity to love her or anyone else.

It doesn't matter, she tells herself again, almost wildly, pacing back into the bedroom.

In a display that is partly defiance toward the man asleep in her bed and so beautiful in the dim light that she wants to hit him, and partly a calculated attempt to stoke her already waning enthusiasm for her plan of desertion, she hurries to her closet. She is already struggling out of the bland, prim little dress and jumper that are as casual, or as interesting, as her attire ever becomes around him, and once these have been discarded again in a heap, she sifts through the back of her closet until she finds a pair of old jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, just the very sort of thing that she knows he would hate – her favourite thing to wear back before the necessity of being 'presentable' at all times.

As a final derisive touch, she pulls her hair back into two short, messy little ponytails, fastened with little rubber bands left in the pockets of the jeans God knows how long ago, and with something so simple, has gone back in time. Reclaimed her own identity and cast off the one chosen for her.

She doesn't quite roll her eyes at her own silliness, but she sighs.

There's a reason she's never had any patience for symbolism.

As she's reaching again for her keys, he calls to her, sleepily annoyed, asking what on earth she's doing.

Almost on instinct, she snatches the rubber bands out of her hair and lets it fall properly into place again.

And somehow, before she knows what is happening, she's pulling off her silly-sloppy-little-girl clothes that he's eyeing scornfully just like she knew she would, and is reaching for some pyjamas, but stops as he looks at her questioningly, and crawls back into bed without them.

Good intentions drain out of her beneath the quiet force of the gaze that she cannot stop obeying so easily whether or not she is right and she has been able to stop loving him.

And, as his lips brush over the back of her ear and she shudders and presses against him and into his good-natured yet vaguely triumphant laugh, she can almost feel her heart breaking, even if this isn't a bad romance novel.

Tomorrow, she decides as he wraps his arm around her waist, she will go buy that plane ticket.

Two weeks' notice will be enough.

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End Notes: Aaaaaaaaand, that's that. 


End file.
